Anglicisms: A Corpus-Based Study of IT Terms in Italian

It is well known that English is the most widely spoken language in the world and it has become the official language of many international organizations. As a result, it has begun to influence other languages by enriching their vocabulary. Therefore, in an era of great technological evolution and social media spread, it is a fact that English features in the vocabulary of several languages all over the world. This phenomenon is called Anglicization. This work is divided in two chapters: in the first chapter, lexical borrowing will be introduced and the way in which Anglicisms have been integrated into the Italian language will be explained, with a particular attention on how English is influencing the technical language of Information Technology (IT). This will be followed by a brief classification of the different types of loanwords. After analysing the several types and uses of those particular phenomena, the second part is a personal research and analysis of a selected number of Anglicisms found in six Italian websites about different technologies. In order to accomplish this goal, a corpus of articles was collected with the Sketch Engine, an online query system. With the creation of the corpus, it was possible to get a word list in which fifty-six Anglicisms were found. The purpose of this work is to observe their diffusion in the Italian language, analyse the most frequent, give an explanation of their Italian meanings ¿ which can sometimes be different from the English one ¿ and finally understand the way they are used in each context and why. In the end we will try to verify whether those Anglicisms are necessary or luxury loanwords by checking the existence of Italian equivalents.